John Suchocki wants to make computer animation as common in courtrooms as it is on Hollywood backlots.

Through his business Eyewitness Animation, the former Eastern Airlines pilot is blazing trails in accident investigation with year-old software that has dramatically cut the cost of three-dimensional animation.

The software, 3-D Studio, has been available since November from Autodesk, the world`s leading supplier of software for computer-aid design and manufacturing. At $2,995 a copy, 3-D Studio is one-tenth the cost of older, more powerful Autodesk animation packages, said Bob Bennett, a product manager at Autodesk`s Sausalito, Calif., headquarters.

``That makes it accessible to a whole new class of people who already own an IBM PC class of computer,`` Bennett said. ``We are just starting to see a whole new class of uses.``

Among the most unique, said Bennett, is Eyewitness` recent recreation of the Feb. 1, 1991, crash between a USAir 737 and a commuter aircraft at Los Angeles International Airport. Twenty-two of 89 people aboard the 737 and all 12 on the commuter plane died.

Using expertise gathered over a 25-year career at Eastern, Suchocki culled data on the accident from the Air Line Pilots Association and National Transportation Safety Board, which head up all investigations of airline crashes. Then he added data on the design, construction, position and trajectory of each plane from aircraft manufacturers, air traffic control records and the Los Angeles International Airport. Information on weather and ambient light conditions during the accident were also added.

The data was then fed into the program to recreate the aircraft and simulate the events leading up to the fatal crash.

``We can absolutely and perfectly recreate an accident from any perspective,`` said Suchocki, who did much of the computer work himself. ``We can reconstruct the entire scenario within 1/100 of a second.``

The software allowed Eyewitness to view the accident from virtually any position. Ultimately, the company produced segments representing three perspectives.

The first and eeriest segment dubs recordings of conversations between the USAir flight crew and air traffic contollers over a simulated view from the jet`s cockpit as it approached the runway. The segment indicated that the flight crew would have been unable to see the commuter plane until one second before impact, when its propellers suddenly appeared out of darkness.

A second segment from the ground in front of the commuter plane shows that the flight crew was never able to see the commuter craft`s forward-pointing warning lights because of the jet`s flight trajectory.

A third segment telescopes in on the commuter plane and then scans to the airborne jet on the last mile of its fatal approach. The segment ends on impact and does not illustrate the explosion that followed.

The animation is so detailed that reflections, shadows and other ambient lighting conditions change in real time as the scene advances.

While the animation was viewed by crash investigators, it has not become part of the official record on the crash, said John Mazor, a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association in Washington, D.C. The official investigation, now centering on errors by an air traffic controller, is expected to conclude in several months.

Suchocki expects to recover his investment in the video by licensing it to lawyers who will inevitably represent crash victims and their survivors against the airlines.

A much larger opportunity, however, may reside with personal injury lawyers litigating automobile and industrial accidents and product liability cases involving as little as $250,000 in damages.

``To have done this before (Studio-3) would have cost $500,000 to $1.5 million,`` Suchocki said. ``Now you can do it for less than $100,000.``

Studio-3 has lowered the cost of generating one second of animation from up to $3,000 per second to $100 to $700 per second, Suchocki said. Costs hinge greatly on whether the animation is done in two or three dimensions and whether it is necessary to animate background changes.

Animation will emerge as an important legal tool before the decade is over, but is still too expensive to use in anything but multimillion-dollar cases, said Fred Hazouri, a West Palm Beach lawyer who has tried many personal-injury cases.

One of the few South Florida cases involving the technique resulted in a $7 million award by a Broward County jury in 1989. Lawyers hired a Cornell University professor to do a computer simulation of a crash between their client`s car and a Publix truck.

Many personal-injury lawyers are discouraged from using expensive devices such as computer simulation by their own contracts, Hazouri said. Most of those contracts stipulate that lawyers can only recover costs incurred in trying a case from awards they win for their clients, Hazouri said. If they lose, they can`t recover costs from clients.

``In the typical auto accident you are going to have to have something that costs a couple thousand dollars,`` Hazouri said.

Given the speed of software innovation, that could be just months away.